TMI
by celticann
Summary: The challenge: Write a story in which two West Wingers find out they are distant relations


**TMI **

Charlie/Zoey, Ainsley, mentions of others

Rating Adult –

Spoilers through end of Season 3

Not mine, never were, never will be, but they consume my soul

Note – "Zoe" is not a misspelling of Zoey. It rhymes with "grow" and his Charlie's pet name for Zoey.

My apologies to the descendants of Francis and Sarah Eaton. I just picked their names off the list.

Feedback and criticism always welcomed

Rick posted a challenge on the "State of the Union" board; this is my response.

"I just issued this challenge on the JD-list and I'm throwing it out here as well.

Write a story in which it develops that two Wingers are distant relations. Who they are and the circumstances of their blood tie are entirely up to you. Over on JD I placed the proviso that having either Josh or Donna be one half of the blood tie would be a likely requirement, otherwise it's not really a JD-fic. Over here I can remove that proviso and open it up a bit more. I assume that the more unlikely the pairing the better.

Have Fun,  
Rick"

I've always wondered what happened to Zoey and Charlie between "The Midterms" and "Holy Night"; this is one possibility.

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_Georgetown__ University__; dorm room of Zoey Bartlet; early December season 3 _

"Pass me the pretzels."

Zoey Bartlet spoke to Charley as she used her purple highlighter to draw a box around a passage in one of the books assigned for her "Moral and Social Deviants" class, then switched to a yellow highlighter to mark the name of the theorist that the author was citing.

"Just a minute; I need to make sure I understand this concept."

Charlie Young's reading system was less complicated than Zoey's. He used blue highlighters for everything, having bought a dozen of them at the beginning of the year. He read the passage in his Statistics text three times, then marked his place and closed the book.

"Here. It's been an hour and fifty minutes." Charlie handed the bag to Zoey and pressed a kiss on the back of her neck. Three years ago, Saturday night study dates wouldn't have been on his top ten list of fun activities, but then, three years ago, he wasn't having sex with Zoey Patricia Bartlet on an exclusive, regular basis.

Having sex with your boss's daughter was a risky gambit in any situation; when said boss was President of the United States, you had to be even more careful. Luckily, Zoey's roommate was engaged to a guy at Fordham and usually took Amtrak to New York every weekend. And this weekend, Deanna was down in North Carolina visiting one of their aunts, so Charlie and Zoey were taking advantage of the circumstances. Normally, all their time would be spent on more pleasant activities, but with the end of the semester approaching, they decided they would devote two hours to the books before satisfying their desires.

Charlie was only taking two classes and lived at home, but one of his classmates lived in the same dorm as Zoey and Charlie was officially signed in as Todd's guest. Of course, he and Zoey weren't fooling the agent in the room across the hall, and they weren't fooling Abbey Bartlet. As for Zoey's father, it was a case of "don't ask, don't tell".

"Well, I guess it won't hurt to stop early."

Zoey closed her book and smiled at the man she had been with for almost two years.

Charlie smiled back at her.

"Undress for me, Zoe," he softly ordered.

Later, they were lying in cramped but sated satisfaction on the bed. Zoey played with the thin line of hair that trailed from his navel to his groin while he drew his thumb along the line of her jaw. They were catching up with each other.

Charlie told Zoey that her father looked somewhat haggard, was worried about Leo's upcoming testimony for the House committee.

Zoey told Charlie that Ellie broke up with her boyfriend; another med student wanted to fix up Ellie with his cousin Vic, who was a Biology post-doc at Penn.

Zoey asked Charlie something about Josh. Charlie suspected that Zoey might have had the slightest little crush on Josh back in '98, during the campaign, but he knew that it was long past. Zoey had grown quite a bit in the last three years, emotionally as well as mentally.

Charlie started to tell her about the late night bull session that some of the staff held on Monday night, Tuesday morning, actually, as they waited for confirmation from the Pentagon about a possible incident in Tibet.

"Zoe, you'll never guess! It turns out I have a relative working for your father!"

"Yeah?" She sat up, effectively dislodging the hand that had been toying with her left breast, the hand that had been planning to creep down her torso and rouse her again. "Tell me about it."

Oh, well. He didn't have to be back at the White House until noon tomorrow; there was time.

"I was telling Sam and Josh that I would be a carefree bachelor this weekend, that Deanna was going down to the Carolinas, when Ainsley asked, "Charlie, you have people in Cross Creek? So do I."

Charlie explained that his third cousin twice removed, Minerva Fharquar, lived on property that had been in the family since right after the Civil War. "Deanna is doing a 'Roots'-type project and Cousin Minerva has all sorts of journals and documents."

"Really? My mother's mother was a Fharquar from Cross Creek," Ainsley answered.

"So I talk to Minerva, ask her some questions, Ainsley talks to her sister, who is the family historian. It turns out that my some number great-grandmother Lucy was Ainsley's some number great-grandfather Branson's, ah, 'companion' for several years before he married. She had two kids by him."

"God! Ainsley must feel horrible!"

"Horrible? To be related to me? Zoe, Ainsley's not a bigot!"

"Charlie, her family owned your family! Her great whatever abused your great whatever."

"Honey, yes, it was slavery. Yes, it was evil. Yes, my five or six times great-grandmother didn't have much choice in the matter. But from what Minerva tells me, in her journal, Lucy never said she was mistreated, sexually. Hell, she was taught to read and write. Branson freed her and her children, sent them to New Orleans to live, had the children educated, visited them, and gave the boy the land in Cross Creek. I'm not condoning slavery, by any means, but their life, and, by extension, mine, was a lot better that it would have been had he not taken her as mistress.

"But let's not talk any more." He brought his mouth down to hers, then kissed her neck, and down the length of her body.

After the second time, Zoey told Charlie that she was having second thoughts about doing the semester abroad program next fall.

"Love, you know I would rather have you here with me than in France, but I don't want you denying yourself this opportunity."

"It's not just you. I want to be here for Dad, for Mom, for the campaign. Of course, there **are** some rather solid benefits to staying." She giggled as she stroked him, pleased that he seemed to be well on his way to satisfying her a third time.

Ten days later, she was having dinner in the residence with her parents and happened to tell them about Charlie and Ainsley. She was still surprised that Ainsley didn't feel any particular guilt about her family owning Charlie's family.

"I mean, there they were, the Fharquars, living the good life on this plantation called New Caledonia, living off the suffering of slaves!"

"Fharquar. New Caledonia. Why does that sound familiar?" her father asked.

"Don't you remember?" Abbey answered. "When Liz did the report in fifth grade, she looked through all the old Eaton shipping journals. She thought that Fharquar was a funny name for a family but that New Caledonia was a pretty name for a house."

"Eaton?" Zoey asked, "your mother's mother's mother's family? The ones that came over on the Mayflower?"

"Yes. My extremely tenuous line to Plymouth Rock. Everyone else on the Barrington family tree was involved in whaling, or farming. But the Eaton's, well, they were part of the 'Notorious Triangle' – trinkets, slaves, rum ."

"Are you saying that one of my ancestors could have stolen one of Charlie's ancestors from Africa and brought him to this country?"

Zoey felt sick to her stomach. She was a guilty as Ainsley. How could she ever tell Charlie? She ran from the table.

Abbey started to get up, to follow her daughter.

"Let me go, Abbey. I'll do it."

"But it was my family, Jed, not yours."

"I know, but given what she's feeling, she might lash out at you, that somehow it was your fault. All my family did was to take an extremely active part in overthrowing the legitimate government in place on this part of the continent, a government that, compared to most others of its time, was fairly enlightened and democratic," the President laughed.

Thirty-five minutes later, Jed entered the sitting room, where Abbey was curled up with the latest JAMA. From the set of his shoulders and the way he sat down beside her, Abbey could tell that he hadn't been very successful.

"I tried, Abbey, I really tried to put it in perspective, but -," he sighed. "I don't know what it's going to do to her and Charlie, but I'm not optimistic."

Abbey put an arm around her husband's shoulders and pulled his head against her.

"Well, you've been concerned, thought they were much too serious, much too involved, even if you've pretended you don't know about his overnight visits to the guy who just happens to live in her dorm. You really thought you were hiding that from **me**?" she laughed at his "I've been caught!" expression.

"Of course I've been concerned; I'm a father and she's my daughter. Yes, I wish Charlie and she would cool it for a few years. But not like this, babe. Not like this."

That weekend, Zoey told Charlie, her head hung in guilt and shame. "So I'm no better than Ainsley," she tried to apologize for the acts of someone some two hundred fifty years up her family tree.

Somehow, Zoey wasn't surprised that Charlie made the same arguments her father had several days ago.

It happened a long time ago.

She was not personally responsible for all the evil committed by her ancestors.

As despicable as they were, the owners of the slave ships were not the only ones responsible for the slave trade.

There were the European manufacturers who made the goods that the African tribes wanted.

There were the tribes themselves, who captured their fellow human beings and traded them for beads, cloth, metal pots, and weaponry. ("The arms race has been a human plague ever since the first prehistoric man sharpened a stick or a stone," her father told her.)

There were the planters in the Caribbean and in the south who wanted cheap labor for their fields. ("Immigration issues have been around since God kicked Adam and Eve out of Eden," Charlie said.)

There were the people who wanted rum ("demon rum", her father laughed), cotton, sugar ("the beginnings of our obesity issues"), etc.

Charlie even used the "something good from something bad" argument.

"Yes, slavery was horrible. Yes, I rage against the injustice I see pointed toward those of us who are black, against the racism and the prejudice I've experienced, against the hatred directed at you and me. But, you know, Zoe, if it hadn't happened, if there hadn't been a slave trade, I wouldn't be here today in your bed, wouldn't be in your life. Again, it's no justification or excuse, but I think I'd rather be here, working for your father and loving you than starving or dying of AIDS in western Africa."

And no, he told her over and over, he didn't feel any outrage against her, against Ainsley. He despised the deeds of their ancestors, but he didn't despise Ainsley or her. Disdain was reserved for people like West Virginia White Pride, the Aryan Nation, the Klan. Carrying hatred over from one generation to the next, from one century to the next, from one millennium to the next – where had that gotten the Greeks and the Turks on Cyprus, where had that gotten the Arabs and the Jews, where had that gotten the English and the Irish, where had that gotten the Hindus and the Muslims on the Indian subcontinent?

"If your father had carried resentment for what happened to his mother's people to the point where he couldn't be friends with Lord Marbury, what might have happened to the world as a result of that border incident India and Pakistan?

"We have to learn from the past, never really forget the past, but we can't let the past drive our lives.

"Now, come here."

Charlie proceeded to make sweet, gentle love with Zoey, to let his mouth, his arms, his body reinforce in her what he had tried to tell her with words.

But it didn't work.

It didn't happen overnight, but it wormed its way into their relationship, eating at the joy they had found in each other.

She started spending a couple of weekends a month at the White House. They still saw each other, but no way was Charlie going to spend the night, or for that matter, twenty minutes, in her room **there**. Even if he could get away with it, no way would he be able to perform with Jed Bartlet just down the hall.

After a while, her apologies, her sense of remorse, began to annoy, and a couple of times, annoyance became frustration, frustration became anger.

Little by little, they were growing apart. It became harder and harder to bring her to climax.

She began to fake it; once or twice she didn't even bother with that.

Her parents, his sister, their friends could only sit by and watch them in their misery. Danny Concannon tried to talk with Charlie; Josh tried to talk with Zoey. Both were gifted with "Fuck off!" for their efforts to help the young lovers.

There was no more discussion about her plans for the upcoming semester; Zoey would be going to France.

Zoey spent the summer commuting between New Hampshire, Washington, and the Delaware shore. They saw each other intermittently.

The Saturday night before she was due to leave, they were spending the night in her girlfriend's apartment. They made love half-heartedly, then fell asleep, their backs to each other. Neither knew that the other had tears silently streaming down their face.

By late October, Charlie eventually began to recover, began to enjoy life again. The upcoming election was exhilarating.

But he never again engaged in late night personal discussions with fellow staffers. He had learned the meaning of "too much information".


End file.
